Calling it the group's next phase, the police officers and community advocates behind the upstart organization Uniting Evansville plan to canvas the Glenwood neighborhood in teams on Monday evening.

The goal, according to a post on the Uniting Evansville Facebook page, is "to physically move into neighborhoods and interact with citizens, businesses and organizations on their terms."

Such efforts, the group hopes, will lead to better relationships between police and citizens. The group was started last summer by two Evansville police partners -- one white and the other black -- and others after Dallas sniper killings of police officers and, before that, the high-profile deaths of black men by law enforcement nationwide.

"We want to actually physically go there and talk to people, meet people where they are at," said Evansville police officer Josh Brewer, one of the group's founders. "Rather than us having an event and people coming to that, we want to go where people are."

Brewer contacted the Courier & Press about Monday's plans. Members of Uniting Evansville plan to walk from 4-7 p.m. The group wants to canvass other neighborhoods as well, but none have been finalized just yet. Though Brewer said the officers won't be in uniform, he wanted to give residents a heads up the organization would be in the area and knocking on doors to ask their opinions about how to better community relations with police.

"... We don't want people to think 'Oh, the police are here; they are trying to catch us.' We were talking to some people, and they said 'Hey, it would be good to give the neighborhood a heads up and say you guys are going to be out there so when they see some random people out there, they know what's going on and what your purpose is."

The group has already had several forums and a community cookout. Brewer said the group so far has been successful in building stronger relationships. He said people have approached him while he's working in uniform and talk to him about an event the group has put on, and he has personally made some connections he would not have if it was not for his involvement in the organization. Brewer said several fellow police officers have also embraced the mission of Uniting Evansville in the last year.

Other founding members of the group include youth pastors and Courtney Johnson, a community activist who also helped create the group Young & Established a few years ago. Johnson said bringing the group together has been the relationships the group members have built both with each other and the community as a whole.

"What we have done in the past year has been amazing. The biggest thing has been the relationships," Johnson said. "We didn't really know what we were going to do it or how we were going to do it, we just knew that something needed to be done. So we came together and everybody has just figured out these are the problems and these are the issues, and lets just take it a day at a time."

Even though he was involved in the community before Uniting Evansville came to be, Johnson said the group has led to him building relationships with people he wouldn't have done so with otherwise, an assessment Brewer also agrees with. Johnson said both he and Brewers and the others who created the group wanted to find a way to get the community more involved in things the police are doing and vice versa, particularity at the youth level. That shared goal, Johnson said makes it easier to have something to work toward, even though each person has a different opinion on how to accomplish that.

"Everybody that was on board when we first got started; we were all active in the community in some shape or form, Johnson said. "So it really wasn't hard for us to work together and get things done because we all had the same vision as far as, 'Look, this is what is going on in our city. What can we all do to push our vision (to make it better)?'"

To learn more about the organization, visit the "Uniting Evansville" page or unitingevansville.org. Johnson's Young & Established also hosted a forum for high school boys on Saturday called the Boys to Men Conference.